Words of a Rebel

By Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus

Peter Kropotkin remains one of the best-known anarchist thinkers, and Words of a Rebel was his first libertarian book. Published in 1885 while he was in a French jail for anarchist activism, this collection of articles from the newspaper Le Revolté sees Kropotkin criticise the failings of capitalism and those who seek to end it by means of its main support, the state. Instead, he urged the creation of a mass movement from below that would expropriate property and destroy the state, replacing their centralised hierarchies with federations of self-governing communities and workplaces.

Kropotkin’s instant classic included discussions themes and ideas he returned to repeatedly during his five decades in the anarchist movement. Unsurprisingly, Words of a Rebel was soon translated into numerous languages—including Italian, Spanish, Bulgarian, Russian, and Chinese—and reprinted time and time again. But despite its influence as Kropotkin’s first anarchist work, it was the last to be completely translated into English.

This is a new translation from the French original by Iain McKay except for a few chapters previously translated by Nicolas Walter. Both anarchist activists and writers, they are well placed to understand the assumptions within and influences on Kropotkin’s revolutionary journalism. It includes all the original 1885 text along with the preface to the 1904 Italian as well as the preface and afterward to the 1919 Russian editions. In addition, it includes many articles on the labour movement written by Kropotkin for Le Revolté which show how he envisioned getting from criticism to a social revolution. Along with a comprehensive glossary and an introduction by Iain McKay placing this work within the history of anarchism as well as indicating its relevance to radicals and revolutionaries today, this is the definitive edition of an anarchist classic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PM Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781629638980

Peter Kropotkin

Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) was a Russian-born geographer, revolutionary, and the foremost theorist of the anarchist movement. Among his many influential publications, The Conquest of Bread (1892) and Mutual Aid (1902) have indelibly shaped anarchist thought and inspired political activists for more than a century.

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PRAISE FOR WORDS OF A REBEL

"Kropotkin almost always wrote for newspapers intended to be read by workers…. Words of a Rebel remains his best anarchist work for freshness of expression and ideological coherence."

—Camillo Berneri, author of Peter Kropotkin: His Federalist Ideas

"With his usual exemplary scholarship, Iain McKay has again done us a great service in establishing a new, authoritative English edition of Words of a Rebel, completed by a selection of Kropotkin’s newspaper articles giving us a much clearer understanding of his thinking about the central importance for anarchists of trade union work. And again, McKay’s introduction does an outstanding job not just of putting Kropotkin’s work into context and explaining its importance for us today but also of debunking some important misapprehensions and deliberate misrepresentations about anarchist communism."

—David Berry, author of A History of the French Anarchist Movement 1917–1945

"Another welcome instalment in McKay’s ongoing project to make Kropotkin’s oeuvre more accessible, this edition of Words of a Rebel contains valuable new translations that provide a fuller picture of the anarchist tradition’s most important theorist."

—Matthew Adams, Loughborough University, author of Kropotkin, Read, and the Intellectual History of British Anarchism

"The renewed interest in Peter Kropotkin’s writings can be easily explained. Capitalist crises are intensifying. The supposed alternatives—the once overwhelming forces of social democracy and authoritarian socialism (‘pickpockets of socialism,’ to use Kropotkin’s phrase)—have been repeatedly shown to be inadequate and, thus, are declining in ideological dominance. Kropotkin’s work is both theoretically rich and practically relevant, both analysing the weaknesses of capitalism-and-the-state (the two, as Kropotkin explains, go hand in hand) and offering practical alternatives. This updated and fuller English-language edition of Words of a Rebel contains not just the collated articles published in the earlier editions but also includes the prefaces, afterword, and footnotes omitted from previous English- language versions. It also has an excellent introduction, glossary, and additional footnotes from the editor, Iain McKay, which clarifies key terminology and contextualises the collection’s main arguments. Among many of Kropotkin’s attributes was to write in a clear and engaging manner which successfully presented anarchism to wider publics. This carefully constructed and highly readable volume will help him do the same today."

—Benjamin Franks, author of Rebel Alliances: The Means and Ends of Contemporary Anarchisms and Anarchisms, Postanarchisms and Ethics

Words of a Rebel

Peter Kropotkin

Translated by Iain McKay and Nicolas Walter

Edited by Iain McKay

Preface by Elisée Reclus

Words of a Rebel

Peter Kropotkin

This edition © PM Press 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without

permission in writing from the publisher

ISBN: 978–1–62963–877–5 (paperback)

ISBN: 978–1–62963–898–0 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020947297

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Contents

Introduction

Further Reading

A Bibliographical Sketch

A Note on the Text

Preface

Preface to the 1904 Italian Edition

Preface to the 1919 Russian Edition

Words of a Rebel

Afterword to the 1919 Russian Edition

Supplementary Material

International Workers’ Association: General Assembly of the Jura Federation

The Anarchist Idea from the Point of View of Its Practical Realisation

International Workers’ Association: Jura Federation

Enemies of the People

The League and the Trade Unions

The Workers’ Movement in Spain

Workers’ Organisation

Congress of the Jura Federation of the International Workers’ Association

Declaration of the Accused Anarchists before the Lyon Criminal Court

The Lyon Trial

A Letter to Georges Herzig

Glossary

Notes

Index

About the Authors

INTRODUCTION

On the Terrain of the Economic Struggle

[T]he trade-union movement … will become a great power for laying the foundations of an anti-State communist society. If I were in France, where at this moment lies the centre of the industrial movement, and if I were in better health, I would be the first to rush headlong into this movement in favour of the First International—not the Second or the Third, which only represent the usurpation of the idea of the workers’ International for the benefit of a party which is not half composed of workers.

—Peter Kropotkin, May 1920¹

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) needs little introduction. Born into the Russian aristocracy, he rejected his privileged background to become an anarchist activist and, eventually, the most famous and influential anarchist theorist of his age—and beyond. Words of a Rebel was the first of his many anarchist books. Edited by his friend and comrade Elisée Reclus, it was published in 1885 while Kropotkin was in prison as a result of the Lyon show trial of 1883 and is made up of articles written between 1879 and 1882 for Le Révolté (The Rebel), the journal which Kropotkin edited.

This period was just one of many in an eventful life. After becoming an anarchist on a trip to Western Europe in 1872, Kropotkin returned to his native Russia and was arrested and imprisoned for his activism in 1874. Two years later, he escaped from the prison hospital and he went into exile, only returning to Russia after the February Revolution of 1917. For over five decades he was at the heart of the European anarchist movement and contributed to all its debates, including championing libertarian communism and anarchist involvement in the labour movement. After the October Revolution, libertarians visiting Russia or deported there, like Emma Goldman, sought his opinions on the development of revolution. He died on 8 February 1921 and tens of thousands marched in his funeral procession along with anarchists carrying anti-Bolshevik banners, the last officially allowed protest against the regime until its fall in 1991.

Yet Kropotkin’s life is not why Words of a Rebel is important and should be essential reading for today’s revolutionaries. Rather, it is the message of the book which is key as its critique of capitalist society and its analysis of the flawed State socialist alternative to it are still relevant.

Le Révolté: Its Origins and Its Legacy

Using the privileges of his scientific position, Kropotkin visited Switzerland in 1872 and took the opportunity to seek out the International he had read so much about. He visited both factions of the Swiss IWA, first the non-anarchist wing at the Temple Unique in Geneva, where he was horrified to see its leaders manipulate a mass meeting in order stop a strike they considered harmful to the electoral chances of their candidate. He then visited the libertarian Jura Federation and wrote, [The] separation between leaders and workers which I had noticed at Geneva in the Temple Unique did not exist in the Jura Mountains. There were a number of men who were more intelligent, and especially more active than the others; but that was all … [and soon] my views upon socialism were settled. I was an anarchist.²

He then returned to Russia and took an active part of the blossoming populist movement. The group he joined—the Chaikovsky Circle—was discussing their future direction and whether it should be further socialist propaganda among the educated youth or to make contact with the workers and peasants. Kropotkin advocated the latter, for propaganda must be made unquestionably among the peasantry and urban workers for the insurrection must proceed among the peasantry and urban workers themselves if it were to succeed. Revolutionaries must not stand outside the people but among them, must serve not as a champion of some alien opinions worked out in isolation, but only as a more distinct, more complete expression of the demands of the people themselves. Moreover, a strike trains the participants for a common management of affairs and for distribution of responsibilities, distinguishes the people most talented and devoted to a common cause, and finally, forces the others to get to know these people and strengthens their influence.³

This activity was cut short when he was arrested in 1874 and (like Bakunin before him) imprisoned in the infamous Peter-and-Paul Fortress. After two years his health failed, and he was transferred to the prison block of the St. Petersburg military prison. This was the opportunity he and his populist comrades were waiting for, and they organised his escape. Leaving Russia, he joined his comrades in Switzerland.

When Kropotkin had first encountered the Jura Federation it was during its peak in terms of activity and theory. Now, in 1877, its best days were behind it and it was essentially moribund. It still met, but the dynamic union organising and innovative thinking of the late 1860s and early 1870s were no more than an inspiration to remaining activists such as Kropotkin. However, he got involved in the movement and wrote articles for Bulletin de la Fédération Jurassienne and L’Avant-garde. When these ended (in May 1878 and December 1878, respectively) he took the initiative in establishing with Georges Herzig and François Dumartheray a new paper as the voice of the Francophone libertarian movement: Le Revolté.

Launched on 22 February 1879, it was an immediate success, selling in a few days all two thousand copies (compared to a maximum of six hundred copies per issue for previous papers). This undoubtedly reflected it being moderate in tone, but revolutionary in substance: I did my best to write it in such a style that complex historical and economic questions should be comprehensible to every intelligent worker. Kropotkin rejected the idea that a socialist paper should be mere annals of complaints about existing conditions, the oppression of the workers, and describing a succession of hopeless efforts to change these as this would produce a most depressing influence upon the reader which the burning words of the editor try to counteract. Instead a revolutionary paper must be, above all, a record of those symptoms which everywhere announce the coming of a new era, the germination of new forms of social life, the growing revolt against antiquated forms of social life. Ultimately, it is hope, not despair, which makes successful revolutions.⁴

Le Revolté was "destined to be the most influential anarchist paper since the disappearance of Proudhon’s Le Peuple in 1850"⁵ and played a key role in developing and popularising communist anarchism. Yet it must be stressed that while its most famous and persuasive advocate, Kropotkin did not invent anarchist communism—it had developed within the libertarian wing of International while he was in prison in Russia.⁶ The term was first used in print by Dumartheray in the 1876 pamphlet Aux travailleurs manuels partisans de l’action politique (To Manual Workers who Support Political Action)—although James Guillaume had in 1874 foreseen the possibility that eventually everyone will draw what he needs from the abundant social reserve of commodities, without fear of depletion.⁷ The concept was swiftly championed by Élisée Reclus and members of the Italian section of the International such as Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero.⁸

Indeed, Kropotkin’s earliest articles in Le Revolté saw him use the term collectivism and it was only in 1880 that he fully embraced the term communism.⁹ He later recalled, "Thus, without knowing that the Italians had done this already at their last congress, I worked for the Jura Federation to call itself communist at its Congress of 1880 [on 9–10 October at La Chaux-de-Fonds]. Elisée, Cafiero, and I got in touch over this; it was accepted, and from then onwards our paper, Le Revolté, became communist anarchist. From that moment onwards dated the successes of anarchism in France."¹⁰

Kropotkin rose to international note as a result of the Lyon show trial of 1883. An increase of anarchist activity in the Lyon region, as well as the outbreak of a bitter labour dispute in the mining town of Montceau-les-Mines, saw the authorities seek to clamp down on the rebels. The miners’ struggle was marked by a secret organisation calling itself the Black Gang (Bande Noir) which threatened to attack the bosses and which, in August, blew up religious symbols such as roadside crosses. The trial of twenty-three alleged members of the gang started in October 1882 but only nine were found guilty in December. No link was found to the anarchist movement. Then, in Lyon, two more explosions took place on 22 and 23 October and gave the authorities an excuse to blame the anarchists. Kropotkin summarised the situation:

Montceau and all neighbouring regions are under siege. And the Chagots, scoundrels of every description … walk with their heads held high, refusing work to those who displease them, arresting those they fear, treating the workers as conquered slaves. In all the major industrial centres, and especially in the mining basins, the troops are massed, ready to fire if the people move. Everywhere the bourgeoisie is preparing to order new arrests. The pretext? It is as simple as it is convenient. It is the affiliation to the International Workers’ Association. Affiliated or not, as long as you are a socialist and a man of action—that suffices for you to be dragged to prison…. And then, it is so convenient. No Jury, therefore no possible acquittal …

As long as the socialist agitation was confined to theories, words, phrases—as long as it was not acted upon, as they say themselves, they let it go. But, as soon as they realised that the propaganda was being acted upon, that it led to the constitution of a party which has vowed hatred on the capitalist and which is organised to fight hand to hand with the one who derives the worker of the fruits of his labour; as soon as acts proved that for this party socialism is not an electoral manoeuvre, but a conviction—oh, then, they started the hunt for men of action, and if they are allowed to do so, they do not will not be stopped by the numbers: they will send thousands of men to prison, they will guillotine, they will shoot if they find it useful for the maintenance of their domination …

But, if the French workers accept the challenge, if in all the big cities of France they rise as one man to vigorously protest by speech, by writings, by demonstrations, by actions, against the vile methods of their exploiters—the bourgeoisie will be forced to retreat, to declare themselves defeated.¹¹

This did not happen and soon fifty-one anarchists, including Kropotkin, were arrested (fourteen escaped arrest). That this was no more than an attempt to repress a growing anarchist influence can be seen from the lack of evidence against the accused (even with the involvement of agent provocateurs) and the charges brought against them:

[T]here was no possibility of prosecuting the arrested anarchists for the explosions. It would have required bringing us before a jury, which in all probability would have acquitted us. Consequently, the government adopted the Machiavellian course of prosecuting us for having belonged to the International Workingmen’s Association. There is in France a law, passed immediately after the fall of the [Paris] Commune, under which men can be brought before a simple police court for having belonged to that association. The maximum penalty is five years’ imprisonment; and a police court is always sure to pronounce the sentences which are wanted by the government…. Not a word was said about the explosions; and when one or two of the Lyons comrades wanted to clear this point, they were bluntly told that they were not prosecuted for that but for having belonged to the International—to which I alone belonged.¹²

The trial took place between 8 and 19 January 1883 and was used very effectively by the defendants to propagate anarchist ideas. Unsurprisingly, the Police Correctional Court found them guilty and they were given a range of sentences, with Kropotkin receiving five years in prison along with a two thousand franc fine as well as ten years of surveillance and deprivation of civil rights for four years after release. The trial was reported internationally, and Le Revolté dedicated a double issue to the trial on 20 January 1883 which included defendant testimony and their declaration on anarchism (drafted by Kropotkin). A pamphlet Compte-rendu du procès de Lyon was immediately issued, and a more detailed account appeared later in the year in the form of a book by John Grave entitled Le Procès des anarchistes devant la police correctionnelle et la Cour d’Appel de Lyon.¹³

Words of a Rebel was published in 1885 by Reclus, while Kropotkin was in prison, a few months before domestic and international pressure resulted in the four remaining imprisoned defendants—along with anarchists Louise Michel and Émile Pouget who had been arrested for other reasons¹⁴—being released in January 1886. Once released, Kropotkin wrote about his experience in the article In French Prisons for The Nineteenth Century (March 1886)¹⁵ and then took up the invite to help work on an anarchist journal in London, co-founding Freedom in October 1886. In stark contrast to the tiny meetings Kropotkin had attended in 1887, on the eve of his leaving France for London he gave a talk in Paris to thousands on 28 February 1886.¹⁶

Le Revolté continued publication first with Herzig as editor and then Jean Grave but in September 1887 "[o]ur ‘boy,’ Le Revolté, prosecuted for anti-militarist propaganda, was compelled to change its title-page and now appeared under a feminine name," La Révolte (Revolt).¹⁷ It, too, was closed by the State in March 1894 after Grave was arrested as part of the repressions associated with the Trial of the Thirty. After the jury acquitted the accused anarchists, Grave sought to re-launch La Révolte but Elisée Reclus persuaded him to call the proposed paper Les Temps Nouveaux (New Times). This journal ran from 4 May 1895 to 8 August 1914. In his Memoirs Kropotkin stressed the continuity of all three papers by writing how Le Révolté "continues, at Paris, under the name of [Les] Temps Nouveaux."¹⁸

Continuity and Change in Anarchist Communism

Words of a Rebel was the critical part of Kropotkin’s work on anarchism which he had to interrupt when he was arrested. On his release in 1886, he began to work out the constructive part of an anarchist-communist society—so far as it can now be forecast—in a series of articles which were later revised and incorporated into The Conquest of Bread in 1892.¹⁹ As such, La Révolte’s main legacy was Words of a Rebel which laid the foundations for Kropotkin’s later work and presented—at least to French readers as an English-language translation of the 1885 edition did not appear until 1992 although a number of chapters were published as pamphlets—a summation of what anarchists thought was wrong about the current system and the wrong ways (Parliamentarianism and Revolutionary Government) of ending it.

Reading Words of a Rebel shows the continuity in Kropotkin’s ideas and how many of its themes were explored and built upon in later work. Thus his critique of capitalism and the State is joined with discussions of ethics, the lessons of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune, as well as the rise of the State on the ruins of the medieval commune—all subjects discussed throughout his political career and included in his final book, Modern Science and Anarchy, published in 1913. Indeed, that work has a chapter entitled The Means of Action which repeats the same arguments and vision of the revolutionary process postulated in The Spirit of Revolt.

This does not mean that there were no changes, far from it. The major change between Words of a Rebel and subsequent works by Kropotkin is that in the early 1880s he underestimated the stocks of food, products, and raw materials held in storage under capitalism which would immediately be available for use during a revolutionary situation. As he recounts in the afterword written for the 1919 Russian edition, he only studied this issue in 1891;²⁰ yet this did not undermine his arguments for he also argued in Words of a Rebel that workers had to restart production under their own management as an essential part of a successful social revolution.

Thus we find Kropotkin noting that during the great railway strike in America of 1877 that it showed both the power of a general strike and the need to turn it as soon as possible into a general expropriation in order to restart production and distribution under workers’ control:

So, when these days come—and it is for you to hasten their coming—in which a whole region and great cities with their suburbs will have got rid of their governments, our work is marked out; all industrial and other plants must be returned to the community, social property held by individuals must be returned to its true master—which is all of us, so that each can have his full share of the goods available for consumption, so that production of all that is necessary and useful can continue, and that social life, far from being interrupted, can be carried on with the greatest energy. Without the gardens and fields that give us produce indispensable for life, without the granaries, the warehouses, the shops that gather together the products of work, without the factories and workshops that provide textiles and metalwork, without the means of defence, without the railways and other ways of communication that allow us to exchange our products with the neighbouring free communes and combine our efforts for resistance and attack, we are condemned in advance to perish.²¹

He also noted that public support was lost when the strike disrupted the supply of essential goods and so stressed that a general strike was only the start of the revolution, for, as well as supplies, there was the pressing need for means of defence and to combine our efforts for resistance and attack. Which, incidentally, belies Marxist claims—repeating Marx and Lenin as if they were disinterested seekers after truth rather than polemicists seeking to win by any means—that anarchists do not recognise the threat of counter-revolution. Rather than build a new State (with all the flaws inherent in centralised, hierarchical, top-down structures) anarchists find new forms of organisation for the social functions that the State apportioned between its functionaries based on "independent communes for the territorial groupings, and vast federations of trade unions for groupings by social functions, both interwoven and providing support to each [other] to meet the needs of society, including mutual protection against aggression, mutual aid, territorial defence."²² Unsurprisingly, Kropotkin stressed the need to go beyond the general strike into insurrection in his analysis of the lessons of the 1905 Russian Revolution.²³

This means that we must be careful to differentiate between anarchist communism as a means and as a goal. The latter is the free, classless society which has moved beyond the legacies of class society (what is sometimes misleadingly termed a utopia). The former is how this is achieved, namely by the expropriation and socialisation of private property and the destruction of the State by means of communal and workplace federations as well as the defence of a free people against those seeking to re-enslave them. Both are related but distinct, for while the future society of our dreams guides how we achieve it, anarchists are well aware that this would take years to fully create: The legacies of thousands of years of class and statist systems cannot be removed in the space of a few hours, days, or even years.

Thus, the sole fact of having laid hands on middle-class property implies the necessity of completely reorganising the whole of economic life in workshops, in dockyards, and in factories.²⁴ The structure of industry, for example, reflects the decisions of the capitalist class to secure and maximise its profits and power, and while a revolution would inherit this and have to set it going under workers’ control, this is not all it will do—a free people would seek to transform this heritage of wage slavery from the start. Initially, this would be transforming working conditions and processes to make them fit for people rather than profit, but it will not stop there. In other words, expropriation is the start not the end of the social revolution, it is the beginning of social reorganisation.²⁵

Words of a Rebel may, at times, express the enthusiasm—and often impatience—of those who first embrace an idea, but alongside are more realistic perspectives which come to the fore in Kropotkin’s later, more mature, works. So there is an occasional rhetorical flourish which, taken in isolation, could suggest that Kropotkin saw anarchist communism being introduced immediately after a revolution. However, looking at his writings as a whole—and this includes Words of a Rebel as a whole—these few comments are not representative of his views.

Thus, in 1879, he was well aware that the revolution [had] to last several years to bear its fruits and that it is necessary that the revolutionary period should last several years, so that the propagation of new ideas is not confined solely to the great intellectual centres but penetrates to the most isolated hamlets.²⁶ This is echoed in Words of a Rebel: It is a whole insurrectionary period of three, four, perhaps five years that we must traverse to accomplish our revolution in the property system and in social organisation.²⁷

The notion of an overnight revolution is one alien to anarchism: No fallacy more harmful has ever been spread than the fallacy of a ‘one-day revolution.’ For Kropotkin such a perspective was only applicable for a political revolution and not for the social revolution envisioned by anarchists, as we do not believe that in any one country the Revolution will be accomplished at a stroke, in the twinkling of an eye, as some socialists dream.²⁸ This was for very obvious reasons:

It is evident, as Proudhon has already pointed out, that the smallest attack upon property will bring in its train the complete disorganisation of the system based upon private enterprise and wage labour. Society itself will be forced to take production in hand, in its entirety, and to reorganise it to meet the needs of the whole people. But this cannot be accomplished in a day or a month; it must take a certain time thus to reorganise the system of production, and during this time millions of men will be deprived of the means of subsistence…. There is only one really practical solution of the problem—boldly to face the great task which awaits us, and instead of trying to patch up a situation which we ourselves have made untenable, to proceed to reorganise production on a new basis.²⁹

Kropotkin, then, was an anarchist not because he saw the social revolution as easy, but precisely because he recognised how difficult it would be. As he indicated in Words of a Rebel—in Revolutionary Government and the 1919 afterword written while the Bolshevik regime was confirming his analysis—concentrating power into the hands of a few in a State would never solve the challenges and difficulties a revolution would face—but it would create a new class system centred around the bureaucracy it would inevitably spawn.

However, as in 1885, the preconditions for creating such a society—namely, the expropriation of the means of life—has to be started as soon as possible by the people themselves so that a revolution becomes a social revolution which, in turn, would eventually produce full libertarian communism: As regards the substance of anarchism itself, it was [my] aim to prove that communism—at least partial—has more chances of being established than collectivism, especially in communes taking the lead, and that free, or anarchist-communism is the only form of communism that has any chance of being accepted in civilised societies.³⁰

So "we know that an uprising may well topple and change a government in one day, whereas a revolution, if it is to achieve a tangible outcome—a serious, lasting change in the distribution of economic forces―takes three or four years of revolutionary upheaval" and were we to wait for the Revolution to display an openly communist or indeed collectivist character right from its initial insurrections, that would be tantamount to throwing the idea of Revolution overboard once and for all. For that to be a possibility, it would require that a large majority be already in agreement upon effecting a communist change, which is generally not the case, since it is primarily the turns taken by a revolution that can draw the masses over to communism.³¹ Hence Kropotkin’s comments from 1913 when he suggested that "the political form of the next revolution would be THE COMMUNE—free, independent and, very probably, communist."³² Whether it was or not—and how extensive the application of communist principles in every aspect of society—was recognised as being dependent on numerous factors, not least the material conditions and the popular consciousness.³³

This can be seen in Words of a Rebel in which the general vision of revolution presented—drawing upon the experience of the Great French Revolution—goes through stages. Initially, conditions are such that most people accept the current regime as inevitable, even just, and there are a few critics and struggles against it. However, over time more and more people start to oppose aspects of the system. This provokes individual acts and a few minor revolts, but these fan the flames of discontent, get more and more people to question more and more aspects of what they formerly took for granted. These rebellions grow in number and size as revolutionaries encourage the spirit of revolt until such time as a crisis comes and the State machine is effectively paralysed by mass disobedience. This stage was expected to last years, and during it the new social organisation created by the struggle, would spread and establish itself as the masses start to expropriate property and seize more and more functions monopolised by the State. Then a revolution takes place and ends both, allowing a free people to create a new society without the shackles of hierarchy holding them back, and transform the legacy left it by class society into one suitable for human beings to thrive in.

Thus, for Kropotkin, revolution was not an event—albeit one undoubtedly marked by specific events such as general strikes and uprisings—but a process. In a sense, then, the transition period started at that time, and so the great mass of workers will not only have to constitute itself outside the bourgeoisie, but it will have to take action of its own during the period which will precede the revolution, and "this sort of action can only be carried out when a strong workers’ organisation exists."³⁴ This also explains the importance of local revolts in Kropotkin’s theory of revolution and within the context of the socialist movement of the time which, in its Marxist form, urged restraint and discipline at all times and so disparaged local actions—revolts, of course, but also at times strikes. For Kropotkin, such a position completely ignored the lessons of previous revolutions and so ensured that no future revolution would ever take place. In this he was completely right—no revolution has ever occurred without local strikes and revolts which to engulf the regime (and the hostility and opposition of the professional revolutionaries who then struggle to catch up with the popular movement they had dismissed and discouraged).

All told, Kropotkin’s ideas remained remarkably consistent during his time within the anarchist movement: in favour of organised anarchist participation within the labour and other popular movements, with the aim to paralyse the State in order to secure a general expropriation and placing economic and social power into the hands of the working masses.³⁵

From Here to There: Resistance Is Fertile

Words of a Rebel lays out a systematic critique of capitalist society along with lessons from previous revolts. If it has a significant lack, it is that it does not explicitly address what had to be done to facilitate the arrival of the social revolution—a complaint which also applies to The Conquest of Bread. As such it fails to discuss anarchist involvement in the labour movement, and at best it is mentioned in passing.³⁶

This edition seeks to rectify this omission by including relevant articles from Le Révolté by Kropotkin which address anarchist participation in the labour movement.³⁷ However, it is wise to discuss this matter here as it is critical to understanding Kropotkin’s ideas and debunking the all too common notion that he was an idealist with no notion of how to get to the society of his hopes, or that he—indeed, anarchists in general—advocated propaganda by the deed (i.e. individual acts of terrorism such as assassinations and bombings) as the means.

Kropotkin’s most general—most visionary, if you like—writings were turned into pamphlets and included in books and later anthologies while those focused on tactics and the day-to-day struggles remained in the pages of newspapers, gathering dust in the archives. However, without these articles there is a significant gap in our understanding of his politics which corresponds to the gap between criticism of the current system and its revolutionary transformation. Sadly, this gap has all too often been filled by those whose grasp of anarchism is weak or simply reflects their prejudices.

Indeed, ignorance of these articles and lacking an awareness of how the notion of propaganda by the deed changed over time, making it far easier to accept the myth of Kropotkin (and anarchists in general) advocating terrorism as means of achieving anarchy. This is particularly important given how often it is repeated by opponents of anarchism, particularly Marxists, as a truism which apparently requires no research to assert. Indeed, Marxists rarely discuss anarchism; rather they discuss their assumptions about anarchism—as gleaned, at best, from reading what Marx, Engels, and Lenin have asserted about it. Thus, for example, Trotskyist Tariq Ali³⁸ uncritically repeats an account of a meeting in 1919 between Lenin and Kropotkin in which the former lectured the latter on the need to reject individual terrorism in favour of working within the masses—both Lenin and Ali seem blissfully unaware that what they consider to be the Marxist position was in fact the anarchist one raised by Bakunin in the International and which Kropotkin had been arguing for while Lenin was still at primary school.

The Terrain of the Direct Struggle against Capital

As Kropotkin later recounted in Freedom, [r]evolutionary Anarchist Communist propaganda within the Labour Unions had always been a favourite mode of action in the Federalist or ‘Bakunist’ section of the International Working Men’s Association, and Le Révolté followed this tradition as did the other newspapers he was associated with.³⁹ This was expressed in Kropotkin’s first major theoretical contribution in exile which saw him argue that the best method of shaking this edifice [of the State] would be to stir up the economic struggle while also taking advantage of every favourable opportunity to point out the incapacity, hypocrisy and class egoism of present governments.⁴⁰ Subsequent articles built on this:

We have to organise the workers’ forces—not to make them a fourth party in Parliament but to make them a formidable ENGINE OF STRUGGLE AGAINST CAPITAL. We have to group workers of all trades with this single purpose: war on capitalist exploitation! And we must prosecute this war relentlessly, every day, by the strike, by agitation, by every revolutionary means … once the workers of every land have seen this organisation at work, taking in its hands the defence of the workers’ interests, waging an unrelenting war on capital … once the workers from all trades, from villages and towns alike, are united into a single union…. Then, but only then, will [they] emerge victorious, having crushed the tyranny of capital and State for good.⁴¹

Unlike parliamentarianism, this direct struggle against capital and State had a radicalising effect:

[H]owever moderate the battle-cry may be—provided that it is in the domain of the relations between capital and labour—as soon as it is put into practice by revolutionary means, it will eventually deepen and inevitably lead to demanding the overthrow of the regime of property. Whereas a party which confines itself within parliamentary politics ends up abandoning its programme, however advanced it was in the beginning: it ends up merged with the parties of bourgeois opportunism.⁴²

As an alternative, he pointed to the Spanish anarchists as remaining "[f]aithful to the anarchist traditions of the International, clever, active, energetic men are not about to set up a group to pursue their petty ends: they remain within the working class, they struggle with it, for it. They bring the contribution of their energy to the workers’ organisation and work to build up a force that will crush capital, come the day of revolution: the revolutionary trades association."⁴³ Only this could create the potential for a revolution:

The enemy on whom we declare war being capital, it is against it that we will direct all our efforts, without letting ourselves be distracted from our goal by the phony agitation of political parties. The great struggle we are preparing for being an essentially economic struggle, it is on the economic terrain that our agitation must take place…. To be able to make the revolution, the mass of workers must be organised, and resistance and the strike are excellent means for organising workers. They have an immense advantage over those advocated at present (worker candidates, forming a workers’ political party, etc.), namely not diverting the movement, but keeping it in constant struggle with the principal enemy, the capitalist…. It is a question of organising in every town resistance societies for all trades, to create resistance funds and to fight against the exploiters, to unify the workers’ organisations of each town and trade and to put them in contact with those of other towns, to federate them across France, to federate them across borders, internationally…. It was by organising resistance against the boss that the International managed to group more than two million workers and to build up that force before which the bourgeoisie and governments trembled.⁴⁴

As well as including articles on current developments and the future of the labour and socialist movements, every issue of Le Révolté had a column entitled Mouvement Social which reported on the labour movement across the world, discussing the strikes, protests, and revolts which it saw as the means of creating a revolutionary situation and evidence that its position was no idle dream. Along with the articles on the labour movement, these are missing from Kropotkin’s books and pamphlets, and so important context is lost. In addition, like other anarchists, Kropotkin supplemented his written propaganda with speeches at workers’ organisations and events (he continued to do this in Britain when his ill health did not stop him). Unsurprisingly, then, Le Révolté reported a talk given by Kropotkin to the Geneva Carpenters Union on 1 December 1880:

The speaker, comrade Kropotkin, made an overview of the economic situation in Europe and … showed … the terrible situation of the workers, and he contrasted these figures to the fabulous incomes and the scandalous spending of the holders of the capital. Large-scale industry, far from improving the lot of the masses, has only made it harder, and this situation will last as long as the worker does not render himself master of the workshops and factories.

The speaker ends with a call for the organisation of the workers’ forces, for the struggle against capital and for the study of social questions. If the bourgeoisie continues, as it does today, to obstruct the workers’ groups by persecuting the active members of the groups, then the workers will be forced to resort to the secret organisations. But in any case, the workers’ forces must be organised in anticipation of the political and economic revolutions that will certainly break out in a few years in Europe.⁴⁵

Thus, like Bakunin, Kropotkin advocated what would later be called syndicalism and rejected the idea that socialists should take part in elections to further the socialist cause or as the means to introduce socialism. This would only push the workers into a dead-end for it meant abandon[ing] the terrain of the economic struggle, of the worker against the capitalist, in order to become a docile tool in the hands of the politicians.⁴⁶ As the subsequent evolution of Marxist parties across the world showed, this was a prescient analysis which he reiterated in numerous articles, pamphlets, and books. Needless to say, he warmly welcomed the rise of revolutionary syndicalism—albeit with a few reservations.⁴⁷

The Role of Revolutionary Minorities

So, in terms of tactics, communist anarchism initially saw no major change from collectivism and it advocated the Bakuninist tactics of labour struggle and insurrection. This, however, did not mean that there was no need for anarchist federations and propaganda (meetings, leaflets, journals, pamphlets, books) both within and outwith the labour movement to spread libertarian ideas and keep mass movements from pursuing tactics which would inevitably turn them reformist.

The collectivists recognised that there was a pressing need for revolutionaries to organise in order to influence the class struggle and workers’ unions towards libertarian tactics and structures. Such was the Alliance of Socialist Democracy, an anarchist organisation Bakunin helped create in 1868 and whose (former) members played a key role in the development of the International in Switzerland, Italy, France, and above all Spain. Kropotkin embraced this perspective on the need for both a militant labour movement and a grouping of revolutionaries to influence it:

My opinion is absolutely that which was expressed by Malatesta…. The syndicate is absolutely necessary. It is the only form of worker’s association which allows the direct struggle against capital to be carried on without a plunge into parliamentarianism. But, evidently, it does not achieve this goal automatically, since in Germany, in France and in England, we have the example of syndicates linked to the parliamentary struggle, while in Germany the Catholic syndicates are very powerful, and so on. There is need of the other element which Malatesta speaks of and which Bakunin always professed.⁴⁸

As can be seen from Words of a Rebel, Kropotkin regularly uses the term party, a word anarchists later tended to avoid. However, he used the word in a wide sense to mean an organisation of those with similar ideas. Part of the conflict within the French socialist movement when he was writing was over whether, as urged by Marxists and others, to convert the existing socialist movement into an organisation which stood in elections (i.e., a party in the usual sense of the word). Kropotkin rejected this in favour of encouraging mass struggle—particularly, but not exclusively, on the economic terrain—along with the need for anarchists to work within popular movements in an organised fashion. As he suggested in his report on the 1877 railway strikes in America, this was essential for a successful revolutionary movement:

That it was not successful was to be expected. It is not by a single insurrection that the people will be able to overcome today’s society … They act wonderfully but they do not set a marker for the future.

Why?—Because let us note it well—the American trades organisations … do not express all the aspirations of the people. Confining themselves to the exclusive domain of wage questions, they are no longer the representatives of the main aspiration which is already penetrating the mass of the people, the aspiration for the fundamental reorganisation of society through social revolution.

On the other hand, we wonder what role the American Working-men’s Party has played in this movement … which, while propagating socialist ideas, neglects their application and persists in eliciting in America, despite the general disgust of the people for politics, a parliamentary movement? On the eve of the movement it spoke, as usual, of elections, of action on the legal terrain—when a spark had already lit a revolutionary fire! Of elections when it was a question of organising the insurrection that was already roaring around them!

Hence—on the one hand, the organisation for revolutionary action without broadly posing the principles of socialism; on the other—the principle, but without revolutionary action and with an organisation made to stop every affirmation of the revolutionary act: such are the causes which have prevented the American movement bearing all the fruits which it could have done, if the American workers’ organisation had been a synthesis of the two present organisations: the principle with the organisation necessary for achieving as much of it as possible, whenever the opportunity presents itself.⁴⁹

The need, then, was a party which worked within the labour movement to infuse it with socialist aims and tactics. One without the other would never produce a social revolution particularly if that party was organised for electoral activity:

In Chicago, communists of the democratic-socialist school tried to propagate their principles—by words, when now it required to realise them in actions. Here is proof of what we have always reiterated, that everything that is organised on the terrain of legal agitation becomes a useless weapon, finds itself disorientated, the day when tired of waiting the people rises.

Suppose that, on the contrary, that we had had the good fortune to have anarchist sections of the International Workers’ Association in America, in the places which had seen the momentarily triumphant of the popular insurrection? What would have happened? This: the people master of capital, factories, workshops, would have organised work for their own benefit; as master of the palaces, bourgeois houses, they would have installed the families of workers in them; they would have created, in a word, a ‘Commune’ as we understand it, and if they had suffered defeat, there would at least remain an immensely resounding act of propaganda for socialism.⁵⁰

The role of revolutionary minorities was clear—to work within the mass movements of the working class to encourage struggle outside parliament in order to create the consciousness and power to overthrow capitalism and its State.

The Spirit of Revolt against Propaganda by the Deed

The period of the early 1880s still influences some accounts about anarchism, particularly most Marxist diatribes about it. This narrative is simple and suggests that it was only after the failure of propaganda by the deed (acts of individual terrorism) by the early 1890s that anarchists turned towards working within the labour movement. This narrative is reflected in George Woodcock’s influential history of anarchism:

The period from 1881 to 1894 had been a time of isolation, when the [French] anarchists wandered in a wilderness of marginal social groups and sought the way to a millennium in desperate acts on the one hand and idyllic visions on the other. The period from 1894 to 1914 saw a fruitful equilibrium between the visionary and the practical…. Anarcho-syndicalism … showed anarchism seeking constructive solutions.⁵¹

The rise of syndicalism is often portrayed (usually by Marxists) as being inconsistent, or fundamentally incompatible, with anarchism, as individual acts are asserted to be the quintessential anarchist tactic.⁵² Yet even Woodcock had to admit that Varlin and the French Bakuninists had also recognised before the Paris Commune the role of the trade unions in the social struggle, and the general strike had been supported by the non-Marxist collectivists within the International.⁵³

The question arises, though, of the relation of Kropotkin to the rhetoric of this period—a rhetoric sometimes encouraged by the police themselves. Thus, for example, a certain Serreaux was a Belgian agent provocateur within the French anarchist movement who, between September 1880 and September 1881, edited the Paris-based weekly journal La Révolution Sociale, which was financed by the Paris prefect of police (who also wrote articles for it). Unsurprisingly, it advocated extreme violence and although many anarchists, including Kropotkin, were suspicious of Serreaux and his paper, a few well-known anarchists did write for it.

As Words of a Rebel shows, Kropotkin eschewed the rhetoric and tactics associated with propaganda by the deed. Yet we should remember that this term was originally associated with organising mass acts of revolt, with the Paris Commune initially used as an example (as it was argued that it had made the idea of communal federalism far better known than all of Proudhon’s books on the subject). The best-known example of this initial version of the concept is the Benevento Uprising of April 1877 which saw around thirty armed Internationalists, including Malatesta and Cafiero, roam the Italian countryside unsuccessfully trying to inspire the peasants to join them in insurrection. When eventually brought to trial, the defendants used the opportunity to spread their ideas before being found not guilty by the jury.⁵⁴ Under the influence of Paul Brousse, the concept became wider and eventually embraced every and all kinds of activity—including acts of individual violence (assassinations or bombings).

While almost every political theory—including Marxism, republicanism, and nationalism—has seen its adherents commit such acts,